Delete your data

You do not need an account, a login, or a reason. One email to hello@harkbell.com with the word delete in it is a valid request, and we answer every one within 30 days — usually within a few working days.

Harkbell is a product of Softech Ops LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, registered at 30 N Gould St 40767, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. Where these pages say "we", that is who they mean.

1. Which of these are you?

The answer changes who holds your data, so it changes who can delete it.

• You run a business on Harkbell — you have an account here. Go to section 2.
• You rang, texted or messaged a business that uses Harkbell — you are their client, not ours. Section 3.
• You used Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp to reach one of them, or signed in with Facebook. Section 4.

2. If you have a Harkbell account

Some things you can do yourself, right now. Apart from the access tokens a disconnect deletes, none of them erases the record underneath — that is the email in the next paragraph.

• Contacts — delete a contact from the Contacts page and it disappears from your workspace at once. The calls, transcripts and bookings it was linked to stay, and so does the record itself, until you ask us to erase them.
• Knowledge and website sources — delete these from Settings, and the agent stops using them.
• Bookings, callbacks and requests — these cannot be deleted from the dashboard. You can cancel a booking, mark a callback as no longer needed, or decline a request, and each stays in your history as cancelled, dismissed or declined.
• A whole business — an Owner can delete one from Settings → Billing, typing its name to confirm. Its agent stops answering and nobody on the team can open it again. It is refused while a phone number or a connected integration is still attached, or while it is the last business on a plan that still bills, so release, disconnect or cancel those first. Deleting is not erasure: its calls, contacts and bookings are kept until you ask us to erase them, as below.
• A connected account — disconnecting Square, Calendly, Google, Outlook or a Meta channel deletes the access tokens we hold for it in that moment. Your bookings stay as your history; our ability to reach that provider ends.

To erase records, a whole business, or the account itself, email us from the address the account uses and say what you want gone — particular contacts, calls, bookings, callbacks or requests, one business, or everything. There is no self-service button for any of this yet, and we would rather tell you that than have you hunt for one. For a business or the account, we stop its agent answering, release any phone number, and erase its calls, recordings, transcripts, contacts, bookings and knowledge from our live systems. Either way we confirm by reply with a reference you can quote.

3. If you called or messaged a business that uses Harkbell

Harkbell answers the phone on behalf of that business. They decide what is collected and how long it is kept; we hold it for them. In data-protection terms they are the controller and we are the processor, which matters because it means the fastest route is usually to ask them directly.

You can also ask us. Email hello@harkbell.com with the phone number or handle you contacted them from, and roughly when. We will either act on it ourselves or pass it to the business and tell you which happened. What we can remove for you:

• The recording and transcript of your call.
• Your contact record — name, number, email, and any notes on it.
• Photos you texted in.
• Your bookings, requests and callbacks with that business.

One thing we deliberately keep. If you told the agent not to call you again, we hold a record of that refusal — a note that this number is not to be dialled. It is the only reason the calls stay stopped, so erasing it is how they would start again. We keep it unless you specifically tell us to remove that too, and if you do, we will say plainly what it means before we do it.

4. If you reached a business through Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp

This section is the one Meta's platform terms require, and it applies whether you messaged a business on one of those apps or used Continue with Facebook to sign in.

What we receive from Meta

• If you signed in with Facebook — an app-scoped user id (a number that identifies you to us and to nobody else), your name, your email address and your profile picture. That is the whole of it. We never receive your password, your friends, your posts or your profile beyond this.
• If you connected a Facebook Page or an Instagram account to Harkbell — access to that Page or account, its name and id (for Instagram, also its username and picture), and the app-scoped id of the person who connected it.
• If you messaged a business on Instagram, Messenger or WhatsApp — the messages in that conversation, the sender id the platform gives us, and for WhatsApp the phone number you messaged from. We use it to answer you and to recognise you as the same person if you also ring the business.

We never post as you, never read anything outside the conversations a business has connected, and never message you first.

How to have it deleted

1. Email us at hello@harkbell.com from any address, naming the platform you used — Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp — and the business you contacted, or the phone number or handle you used. We reply with a confirmation reference and delete everything we received from Meta about you, along with the conversation itself.
2. Or remove the app on Facebook or Instagram, if you connected a Page or an Instagram account to Harkbell or signed in with Facebook. That cuts our access at the source. On Facebook go to Settings & Privacy → Settings → Apps and Websites; on Instagram, to Apps and websites in your settings. Find Harkbell and remove it. That revokes our permission, and we forget the Page or account you connected, with our access to it, as soon as Meta tells us. If you also ask there for your data to be deleted, Meta passes that request to us, and we delete your Facebook sign-in straight away, with the id, tokens and picture stored for it. The name and email a Harkbell account was created with stay with the account until you ask us to erase it, as section 2 describes. Meta shows you a confirmation code, and this page, opened with that code, says what was deleted. For anything else we hold, such as a conversation, use the email above.

The email route erases everything we hold about you, on the timescale in section 5. Removing the app deletes only what we received from Meta about you, and does it at once.

5. What “deleted” actually means, and when

• Live systems — gone when we action the request, which is normally within a few working days and always within 30.
• Backups — our backups roll and are never more than 14 days old, so anything erased leaves the backups within 14 days of that. We do not reach into a backup to surgically remove one record, because restoring a mangled backup is how you lose everybody's data instead of one person's.
• Subprocessors — the companies listed in our Privacy Policy that handle call audio and text are instructed to delete in step with us.
• Confirmation — you get a reply telling you what was deleted and quoting a reference. If we cannot delete something, that reply says which thing and under which law.

6. What we keep, and why

A deletion request does not override the law, and we would rather list the exceptions than surprise you with them.

• Billing and tax records — invoices and payment records, for as long as tax law requires, normally six years. These identify a business and an amount, not a caller.
• Do-not-call and consent records — as explained in section 3, the record of a refusal is what keeps it honoured.
• Security logs — a short rolling window, kept so that we can investigate abuse.
• Anything under a live legal obligation — a dispute or a lawful request, for as long as it lasts and no longer.

7. Your other rights

Deletion is one of several. You may also ask to see what we hold, correct it, take a copy elsewhere, object to a use of it, or ask us to restrict it — the same address, the same 30 days. In the EU or UK you may complain to your data protection authority; in California you have equivalent rights under the CCPA. We do not sell or share personal information as those laws define it, and we never have.

The full picture of what we collect and why is in the Privacy Policy.

8. Contact

hello@harkbell.com — read by the people who built this, answered on working days.